Monthly Archives: February 2011

In Wisconsin, people are standing outside in 17 degree weather. Here in Los Angeles, we were afraid that no one would show up if yesterday’s rain persisted. But by 10 in the morning, the sky was a gorgeous blue, a perfect day to stand in solidarity with public union members outside the LA City Hall.

I was there representing the Internet, which shall be present at every rally of the 21st century. This sign is awesome because its heavy-duty lamination will last forever and because in the future I can just cover up the “Scott Walker” and put in any person or thing I want. Yes, you may borrow it.

From a couple blocks away, it was easy to find. You just had to follow all the other people wearing red and white (badger colors) and carrying signs. The turnout was great: I estimate a couple thousand, or using Fox News calculations, five or six million.

The cheeseheads were out in force, too, managing to look amazingly dignified.

And surprise, the Koch brothers showed up and gave a speech! (These Koch brothers, naturally.)

Partway through the rally, we saw a distant force approaching. Are they friend or foe?

It’s the March for Choice, arriving about 400 strong to lend their support!

After the rally, we actually did locate the opposition, who were LaRouche crazies, of all people. It was smaller than the number of people who took pictures of my sign, and to nobody’s particular surprise, had the only especially uncivil signs at the entire event.

Also after the rally, I found another representative of the Internet! Bad picture, I know, but I was primarily there to rally, not to photograph. (She’s laughing at my sign.)

Good use of a Saturday? Without a doubt.

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The nationwide Rallies to Save the American Dream took place at every state capital in the nation, plus many other cities. Estimates place the crowd in Madison today at a jaw-dropping 70-100,000. It was all organized by MoveOn.org, of course. You can follow the Twitter hashtag #WeAreWI; the LAist has some more reports on the LA protest here.

In 1972, a writer named Geoffrey Hoyle wrote a children’s book about what he thought life would be like in the future: specifically, in the year 2010. Years later, someone happened to pick up a copy of said book at a library discard sale and posted it on the internet.

And the internet made a collective decision: We liked Hoyle’s vision of the future which is now the present. Parts of it are uncannily predictive, parts are hilariously inaccurate, and parts are adorably optimistic. Also, he predicted the iPad. And so launched the Facebook campaign to find Geoffrey Hoyle.

So far they’ve found his Facebook page but haven’t succeeded in talking to him yet. He did make some comments in this BBC article, though.

Are we living in the future? Perhaps. But I don’t see jumpsuits catching on any time soon.

How many of you, in your church today had a woman preach, a woman teach, or a woman lead worship? Second, how many of you have a woman who has the title of “pastor”?

He has received nearly 200 responses, which I have compiled into some interesting, if statistically meaningless, data, which I present here hopefully free of my usual veneer of sarcastic commentary.

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Question 1: How many of you, in your church today, had a woman preach, a woman teach, or a woman lead worship?

Yes: 104 total

38 had a woman preach

17 had a woman teach

42 had a woman lead worship

30 did not specify

No: 70 total

28 have had women participate in these capacities in the past

8 haven’t in the past (or didn’t specify), but would allow it

12 would not allow it

22 did not specify

Overall:

120 would allow women to serve in at least one of the mentioned capacities

34 would not allow it or did not specify

Question 2: How many of you have a woman who has the title of “pastor”?

Yes: 87 total

No: 83 total

5 have had female pastors in the past

15 haven’t in the past (or didn’t specify), but would allow it

20 would not allow it

5 have no “pastor” or equivalent title

37 did not specify

Overall:

107 would allow women to serve as pastors

62 would not allow it, did not specify, or have no “pastor” role

I reiterate here that these statistics are not actually indicative of anything because of the large selection bias inherent in Scot McKnight’s readership: as a politely but vocally egalitarian blog, Jesus Creed tends to attract egalitarians, or at least people who are open to the viewpoint.

Here are a few other interesting trends that I noticed but didn’t enumerate:

Many “yes” responses were husband-wife pastoral teams.

UMC churches were the most widely represented among “yes” responses.

“No” responses were the most likely to quote a Bible verse (only 1 Tim. 2:12).

These chocolate-covered creams are easy to make, require no cooking or candy thermometer, and are sure to wow everyone.

Ingredients:

Butter or margarine, softened

Cream cheese

Powdered sugar

Various extracts

Food coloring

Chocolate chips

White chocolate chips

In a small bowl, cream together about 1 T. butter to 2 T. cream cheese. You can use any quantity you like, but remember that a small quantity will make a lot of candies. Add about 1 C. sifted powdered sugar for every 1 T. butter, adding additional powdered sugar as needed until the mixture is no longer sticky.

Separate the mixture to form different flavors. I made five flavors: Vanilla, raspberry, orange, lemon, and mint. To each of the separated parts of the mixture, add a tiny amount of extract (one drop is easily sufficient; be particularly careful with mint) and one drop of food coloring (except for the vanilla). Be particularly careful when coloring the orange.

Melt the chocolate in a chocolate melter or double boiler. Shape the mixture into 1/4″ balls. Dip the balls into the chocolate, coating thoroughly, and place on a sheet of waxed paper to dry, making sure to keep the flavors separate.

Clean out the chocolate melter or double boiler and melt a very small amount of white chocolate. Separate it into portions. With a toothpick or the tine of a fork, take a tiny bit of food coloring and mix it with one portion of the white chocolate. Use the toothpick to place a dab of the colored chocolate on top of each candy of that flavor. If the colored chocolate has cooled and is not sticky, you can instead roll a tiny ball of it and place it on top. Repeat with each flavor. This may be easier while the candies are still wet.

Allow candies to dry completely and enjoy. Note: If you intend to share these with friends, relatives, or coworkers, do not leave them where your husband can find them.

Assuming you live on planet Earth, you’ve probably already seen Amy Chua’s article about Chinese parenting, read the resulting can-only-be-described-as-a-shitstorm, and formed an opinion about it. I’m not, per se, interested in reopening that discussion here, except to mention that Chua reports that her book has been somewhat misrepresented, but I and many others zeroed in on an interesting sentence:

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you’re good at it.

Most of the people I’ve discussed this with agree. I do not. Although many mitigating factors exist that make activities less fun if you’re less skilled, skill and fun are not, in essence, connected.

Let’s run though the mitigating factors. First, there is the pleasure of accomplishment. This is clearly distinct from the fun of the activity. For instance, if you score 1600 on the SATs, you should feel a sense of accomplishment, but that doesn’t make taking the SATs fun. And fun exists without accomplishment; the existence of competitive recreational games played among friends and with children hinges on the ability of even the people who lose to enjoy themselves.

Then there’s the factor of your ability relative to other participants. If you’re the absolute worst person there, then yes, it’s difficult to have fun, no matter how encouraging and considerate everyone else tries to be. Some activities are geared towards a certain skill level and are drastically less fun if you aren’t at that level: A game where winning is exceedingly difficult would not be much fun for someone who was never able to win. But this can almost be regarded as a design flaw, since it’s perfectly possible to design a game that is fun for experts and beginners alike. But regardless, it isn’t your lack of skill that makes the game less fun: It’s the difference between your skill level and that of the other participants (or assumed participants). Messing around with other beginners is usually perfectly fun.

Finally, I must mention that an activity isn’t fun if someone else is trying to keep you from enjoying it. Of course you won’t have fun doing something poorly–or well–if your mother is constantly berating you.

So then, assuming that none of the mitigating factors apply, are unskilled activities fun? Sure they are. In fact, a key weakness of Chua’s statement is its underlying assumption that a meaningful standard of skill can be applied to any activity. In fact there are plenty of activities, such as the finger painting shown above, that one can’t really be “good” at: they exist solely for the sake of the process and the result is just a side effect. There are other activities, including the arts in general, where an emphasis on enumerating skill is detrimental; little is gained by ranking whose painting is the best, whereas it’s very fruitful to discuss each painting in light of its own merits and the differences between them.

Improving can be fun. But the fact that it can be fun to see that this picture looks much better than the one you drew a year ago is itself evidence that one doesn’t have to already be good before the activity can start being fun. Indeed, if one is already good and there isn’t any real improvement to be made, what’s the fun in that?

I don’t have anything substantive to say this week, so I’ll bring up Sarah Palin’s WTF moment, which happened last week. Here’s the video, if you didn’t catch it; it’s her response to the State of the Union.

There’s so much to say–the lack of substantive statements, the complete misunderstanding of Sputnik, the giggly awareness that she just said a naughty acronym on TV, the WTF accusation coming from the party of the “human-animal hybrid” State of the Union, the WTF-worthy “Spudnut” moment pretty much in the same sentence–but I don’t want to talk about any of those.

I want to talk about her voice. It’s just horrible. It makes me want to claw my ears off. Doesn’t matter what she’s saying. Even the most brilliant points would sound like inane babbling in that whiny drawl, and when it actually is inane babbling…well, I can’t imagine sitting through a State of the Union like that, even with a drinking game*. It’s one thing that must be appreciated about Obama. And Clinton, proving that it isn’t the drawl that’s holding her and Bush back. And Reagan, for that matter….JFK…FDR…I’ll stop.

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*As you can imagine, human-animal hybrids featured prominently in the 2007 SotU drinking game.